John Irving
Born 2 march 1942
John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven.
Mr. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times—winning once, in 1980, for his novel The World According to Garp. He received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for his short story “Interior Space.” In 2000, Mr. Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person.
An international writer—his novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages—John Irving lives in Toronto. His all-time best-selling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Quotes
“Your memory is a monster; you forget — it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
1989 “Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.”
Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
Chapter 19 “To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.”
Chapter 6 “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”
Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0), chosen with AI.